World Cup Lit: From ‘Hot Maroc’
This excerpt appeared in the FOOTBALL issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which you can still get in print and digital.
Alexander Elinson
From Saïd Khatibi’s ‘I Resist the River’s Course’
Saïd Khatibi’s I Resist the River’s Course — on the shortlist for the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), with a winner set to be announced online April 9 — chronicles half a century of Algerian history, from the Second World War to the early 1990s.
Translating Noir: On ‘The End of Sahara’
In this conversation with ArabLit’s Tugrul Mende, translator Alex Elinson talks about how literary prizes affect the translation landscape, the draw of detective novels, and how he hones voice in a novel with many starring characters.
‘History of Ash’: A Discussion on Light, Darkness, and Writing and Translating the Political Prisoner
By M Lynx Qualey Published this month by Hoopoe Fiction, History of Ash is a fictional prison account narrated in turns by Mouline and Leila, both imprisoned for their political activities during […]
The Gifts of Movement | Transformative Migrations in the Digital Age: Saïd Khatibi and Amara Lakhous in conversation with Alexander Elinson
Saïd Khatibi is a novelist, travel writer, translator, and cultural journalist, born in 1984 in Bou Saâda, Algeria. He writes in Arabic and French and translates between both. He has […]
On Translating the Linguistic Diversity of ‘Hot Maroc’
” Like Rahhal, I specialized in Arabic literature in university, so many of the literary references, jokes, and asides were familiar to me, but many more were not and I found myself diving deeply into biographical dictionaries and classical Arabic poetry collections just to keep up.”